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Extending further and refining Prince’s taxonomy of given/new information

Authors :
Rudy Loock
Savoirs, Textes, Langage (STL) - UMR 8163 (STL)
Université de Lille-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
Source :
Pragmatics, Pragmatics, 2013, 23 (1), pp.69-91. ⟨10.1075/prag.23.1.04loo⟩
Publication Year :
2022
Publisher :
John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2022.

Abstract

International audience; The aim of this article is to complement and refine Ellen Prince's well-known taxonomy of given/new information (Prince 1981, 1992), which distinguishes between discourse-related and assumed familiarity-related newness/givenness. What we suggest is that a new category should be added to the existing hearer new, hearer old, and inferrable information categories, so as to include cases where the informational status of an entity or a propositional content cannot be determined with certainty. We call this new category 'the (hearer) indeterminables', and we justify its existence through a case study on non-restrictive, relevance oriented constructions (appositive relative clauses, non-restrictive pre-modifiers, apposition). We also argue that it is possible for speakers/writers to simulate informational statuses for politeness considerations, and that such simulation should be included in the definition of assumed familiarity.

Details

ISSN :
24064238 and 10182101
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)
Accession number :
edsair.doi.dedup.....3787f8cf27f59debfa7ea40bd62559ef
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.23.1.04loo